Active relationships: the key to involving communities

Active relationships can open doors to other sources of information and influence.

You need time to develop effective relationships. You may be in contact with these people over months or even years. To make a relationship work, you need good listening skills and a willingness to share real information. Relationships are based on mutual trust and respect, which must be fostered.

A successful relationship:

• allows for different views but finds areas of common agreement
• is transparent, with the constraints on each party clearly understood.

You need to define the groups likely to be affected by your proposal or work. Groups may be based on ethnicity, age, gender, employment status, disability, geographical location, issue or interest, or any other number of factors.

There are a number of places you can go for advice.

• Talk to colleagues with experience in working with the communities involved.
• Consult networks of other agencies.
• Use information on this site to contact specific population groups and umbrella organisations.
• Use directories of community organisations.
• Ask local authorities about community networks.

Most government agencies have some level of interaction with the community and voluntary sector. Relationships between government agencies and the voluntary sector include:

• Agencies with programmes that involve volunteers (eg, NZ Police, Archives NZ)
• Agencies whose policy work or legislation impacts on the activities of community groups or volunteers (eg, Inland Revenue, the Department of Labour via the HSE Act)
• Agencies that provide funding to, or contract services from, community organisations (eg, SPARC, Ministry of Health)
• Agencies whose key stakeholders or target audiences include community or voluntary organisations (eg, Ministry of Social Development, Child, Youth and Family)
• Agencies that rely on volunteers and community groups to assist them with disseminating key messages or implementing work programmes (eg, Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management)
• Agencies whose special interest groups have significant interaction with the community and voluntary sector (eg, Office for Disability Issues, Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs)
• Agencies with policies in place to support the private volunteering activities of their staff (eg, Land Transport NZ, Department of Internal Affairs).

Identifying the impact/contact your agency already has is a good starting point to help you define your community, identify your stakeholders and benefit from input from staff within your own agency.

Dialogue may begin in various, often informal, ways. A community group might invite you to a meeting, or you might see a notice in a local paper about a meeting that may be helpful to your work – go and join in!

Or you may invite relevant community groups to an informal meeting. In this case, your goal may be very simple – for example, to:

• identify broad areas of common interest
• discuss the advantages of building an ongoing active relationship
• inform participants about what is happening or what is planned
• identify people interested in sharing information, so that you begin to build up a contact list
• agree on some preliminary ways of working together.

Active relationships can be used throughout the policy or service development cycle from:

• building a vision of what is desired
• agreeing on the problem to be addressed
• developing and analysing options
• choosing and implementing the preferred option
• monitoring and evaluating.

It is important to consult your community network when identifying the problem or issue. Identifying the appropriate level of participation is something else that people in your network can help you with.

With a few judicious phone calls to key contacts, you can quickly obtain information. Such informal ‘research’ should be used sparingly.